


Blood on the Ground

by romanticalgirl



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-01
Updated: 2009-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-23 11:25:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete takes the first swing</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood on the Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/profile)[**inlovewithnight**](http://inlovewithnight.livejournal.com/) for the beta and for indulging my need to hurt the boys I love.

  
Pete takes the first swing.

After that it descends into a free-for-all, though Pete and Gabe are at the core of it. It probably looks unbalanced from any angle – Gabe’s over six feet and Pete’s…not. But Pete is small and fast and _angry_ and Gabe thinks it’s a joke right up until it’s almost too late, so he’s playing catch up the entire time. When Patrick and Ryland finally break them up, there’s blood on the ground and both of them are breathing hard.

Gabe jerks his arm away from Patrick and wipes the blood off his chin, glaring at Pete the entire time. Ryland’s practically holding Pete off the floor and the rest of the party has died down to the shuffling silence of awkwardness. Gabe licks at his teeth, the white stained red with blood, and shrugs everyone around him off. His dark eyes are sharp and cutting on Pete as he turns on his heel and walks away.

Ryland lets Pete go and Pete’s shaking hard enough that it’s difficult to stand. He can feel the skin of his knuckles and he looks down to see three of them are split. He has to blink back blood and his nose doesn’t feel right. Patrick takes his arm and leads him through the whispers, heading back to the bus. The lights on the Cobra bus are on and Pete can see them shine on Gabe as he goes through the door.

“You all right?” Patrick asks softly.

“No.”

“What happened?”

Pete looks at him, his eyes feeling like bruises. “What didn’t?”

**

The bathroom light is painfully bright, the red blood looking like something out of a horror movie. One eye is swollen and his lip is swollen and his nose looks like it’s broken, but he can still breathe, so he doesn’t think it is. He runs water in the sink and then washes his face, hissing at the sting on the open cuts. Patrick is sitting on his bed, waiting for Pete to come out and answer him, but Pete’s not sure there _are_ answers. How do you explain when it just all goes too far too fast and the only way out of it is to fight your way, to leave marks and bruises behind because if you’re touching them, hurting them, they can’t do it to you?

“Come sit down, Pete.”

Pete blinks and wonders how much time has gone by. He feels like he’s lost something along with himself as he turns around. Patrick looks tired and worried, and Pete feels guilty, because he’s relatively certain it’s because of him. “Is Gabe okay?”

“Gabe’s a big boy.” Patrick guides Pete down onto the mattress. “You want to talk?”

“I need to talk to Gabe. He can’t leave the tour.” Realization comes crashing down – what happened, what he did, what happens next – and it settles on Pete’s shoulders like a physical weight. “Shit. They can’t leave the tour.”

“Gabe’s not going anywhere.”

The rumble of the bus engine next to theirs puts lie to Patrick’s statement, and Pete has to grab the bed to make sure the world doesn’t fall away. “That’s their bus.”

“They’re just going on to the next town. Give you two some breathing room.” Patrick keeps a steadying hand on Pete’s arm. “Why don’t you lie down?”

“Fuck, no. I have to talk to him. I have to…fix it. Fix us. Shit.” He scrubs at his eye as blood trickles into his vision, making him see red altogether differently. “You have to make them stop.”

“We’ll see them in the next town, Pete.” Patrick goes into the bathroom and grabs a washcloth, bringing it back and pressing it to Pete’s eye. “What happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” When Patrick makes a disbelieving face, Pete sighs. “Nothing, honest. It was just…Gabe. Being Gabe.”

“Gabe being Gabe covers a lot of shit.” Patrick takes Pete’s hand and places it against the cloth. “Did he say something? Do something? C’mon, Pete. I can’t help if I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing to help.” Pete shakes his head. “Fuck. I ruined everyone’s night, didn’t I?”

“Not as much as you would have if the owner had actually called the cops like they threatened. We’re good, buddy. Just relax, okay?” Patrick frowns, and Pete knows he’s worried. It’s what Patrick does. Pete worries about the world and everything else, and Patrick worries about Pete. “Get some rest. Just close your eyes, okay?”

Pete nods, though they both know it’s a lie. He lies down until Patrick’s out of the room, then he reaches for his phone. It’s not where he keeps it, not where he would have left it if he didn’t have it on him, and he realizes that Patrick has it. Pete can feel tears pricking behind his eyelids and he wants to scream out loud. Instead he does it inside his head until everything else is washed away in the sound.

**

Pete wakes with a start and sits up in his bed, reaching for the light, for his phone, for something to ground him. His hand curls around the edge of the table and he manages to get the light on, but everything is still off-kilter, fucking Twilight Zone. Patrick’s asleep in the chair at the other end of the bed, his feet propped on the mattress, his bare feet dirty on the bottoms. Pete yawns and scrubs at his eyes, crying out softly. Patrick’s awake immediately and he hisses. “You’ve got a shiner. I’ll go get you some ice.”

Pete lets him leave before he gets up to take a piss, peeing with his back pressed to the opposite wall of the small bathroom. He doesn’t turn on the light, just listens to the heavy stream hit the water until parts of him relax and he thinks maybe he can breathe. He washes his hands in the dark and then turns on the light, looking himself over.

The cut above his face is deep – no doubt from one of Gabe’s rings. His eye is swollen almost shut, crusted with sticky sleep and dried blood. His upper lip is swollen even more, though it makes his nose at least look back to normal. He leans in and looks at the cut, pulling the dry edges apart until it bleeds again then pressing them back together.

“Stop that, Jesus.” Patrick grabs Pete’s shoulder and shoves him back to the bed. Pete stumbles and sits down on it, the mattress giving way slightly under his weight. “Here.” He hands Pete a towel wrapped around a bag of ice. “Pete…”

“Don’t want to talk about it.” Pete wishes he was normal, that he could fall back into the refuge of sleep, but no one would believe it of him. He learned a long time ago that sleep is dangerous, that things come after you in the dark. He learned that shutting out didn’t keep you safe, and shutting down got you hurt, so he hovers somewhere on the edge of manic, wishing there was a place safe enough to fall.

Patrick sighs and sits next to Pete on the bed. “Well, I can’t let it eat you up inside. I can fucking see the panic in your eyes. You want me to call Gabe?”

“No!” Pete doesn’t mean to say it, doesn’t mean to say anything. He wants to go back in time and get a grip, to not let the exhaustion and alcohol and emotions take him over and leave him here without any of them to shield himself with. “No. Don’t call Gabe.”

“Gabe’s not going to be mad.”

The laughter borders on hysteria and it hurts. He probably took at least one shot to the ribs, maybe one to the kidney. Gabe grew up in New York and New Jersey and he fights like a dirty street kid, all anger and bravado and balls-out. “I hit him in the _face_.”

“Which is kind of impressive given the reach.” Patrick smiles a little, but it doesn’t reach his eyes and Pete can’t manage to match even that much. “Let me call him.”

“No.” Pete shakes his head and turns over, body curled in on itself until he’s smaller than normal, trying to be small enough that he can disappear. Being bigger than life hasn’t made it any better, so he goes the other way in here, smaller and smaller until one day he’ll be gone. “Nobody talks to Gabe.”

“He’s probably just as freaked out as you are, Pete.” Patrick’s voice has an edge of irritation in it, that hint that Pete sees sometimes where he knows all Patrick wishes is for Pete to be rational for one minute of every day. “He probably doesn’t even know what he did.”

“Nobody,” Pete says in the voice he rarely uses, the one that’s the voice of Decaydance Records, the voice where the buck stops and everyone says ‘yes, sir’. “Nobody talks to Gabe.”

**

The problem with living on a bus, even one as nice as theirs, is that nothing is private. When Ashlee and Bronx are here, everyone knows what’s going on. Everyone knows all the fights and the fucks, the groupies and the wannabes. Everyone knows everything until there’s no point in keeping secrets at all anymore. And Pete doesn’t believe in secrets, not really, not anymore. He lives his life like an open book – messy handwritten pages for anyone to see. He has no privacy and his life is fodder for TV shows and fans, fiction and supposition.

He knows that’s why it drives everyone crazy when he won’t come out of his room and all the gossip he gets is through the voices that carry now and then. Patrick doesn’t bother to explain anything to anyone, and Pete imagines he just shrugs when the inevitable questions about what happened come up.

They roll into the next town and Patrick has a doctor come in to look Pete over, and Pete hears talk that he’s going to see Gabe too. It’s weird to think what Gabe might look like when all Pete can see is the demon mask of Gabe’s bloodstained teeth. There aren’t any stitches and playing is going to hurt like hell, but he gets a relatively clean bill of health. He can look out the window and see the Cobra bus and he stares at it from time to time, trying to will the doors open, but nothing every happens. It’s like a ghost town where only the wind is alive.

Victoria comes over and talks to Patrick at the door of the bus. Pete opens his door, but he can’t really hear anything clearly. He comes out of his room and settles down at the table, grabbing a pen and an errant piece of paper, drawing ragged angels until Patrick comes back and sits across from him.

“How’s Gabe?”

Patrick shrugs one shoulder and kicks Pete’s foot under the table. “Not talking to anyone. Fans are going crazy wondering if you two ran away together, since neither of you is twittering.”

“You could give me my phone back.”

“Yeah,” Patrick nods, “and then we all have to deal with the fans freaking out that you’re going to do something stupid because you’re filled with black despair.” He rubs a spot on the table and then looks up at Pete. “Tell me why.”

“I can’t tell you why.”

“You _can’t_ tell me why because I wouldn’t understand? Because you don’t want me to think of you one way or the other? Or because you won’t tell me?”

“Because…” Pete scratches heavy marks through the angel, smearing the ink with his knuckles until the paper rips. “It’s personal.”

“Personal.” Patrick’s voice goes flat and weird and Pete knows he’s said the wrong thing. He’s always been good at the wrong thing. “Dude, if we got any more personal, we’d be a split personality.”

“I know. That’s not…” Pete blows out a breath and closes his eyes. Nothing goes away behind his eyes. Every blast of light, every audience, every victory, every defeat, every smiling face, every frown. Gray and black and white and all the colors tangled up until he feels like going blind just to make it stop. “I trust you with everything, Patrick.”

“Except this?” It’s a question and Pete’s not sure he has the answer. He’s not sure he’s ever had any answers except the ones he learned, the ones he can’t talk about.

“I don’t have the words. If I did, I’d give them to you. Let you sing them. Make them make sense.” Pete shoves the paper away. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried saying them and writing them down and they don’t come out. Whenever I reach for them, they fade away like they weren’t there, like they’re _not_ there.”

“Maybe you don’t need the words,” Patrick offers. “Maybe you just need what’s behind them.”

Pete sighs and shrugs, looking down at his hands. His body betrays him time and again, gets him in trouble in ways that he can’t control. He’s tried to tame it with needles and ink, with buckles and belts, with layers he can hide beneath, but it’s always there. Too small, too out of control. He has a soul of screaming rage and it beats at the walls of his body like frantic wings, like a bat that can’t escape.

“Did Victoria say anything about the tour?”

“Nothing to say,” Patrick reaches out and rubs the back of Pete’s hand with his thumb. “We have dates and they’re going to play them. Everything’s cool.”

**

The sound check is shit, which is fine. If the sound check is shit, the night goes well, and everyone who’s anyone in music knows that. Patrick gives Pete his phone back and when he comes back in, his laptop is right where it belongs. He calls a few people and deletes a lot of messages, skimming through Twitter and realizing that Patrick was right – everyone seems convinced that he and Gabe have done something stupid or worse, and the internet is abuzz with rumors and innuendo, not to mention a few eye-witness accounts of the fight. He gets caught up in conspiracy theories – he and Gabe are lovers and have run away to marry in Barbados, which makes him wonder what the laws are in Barbados for same sex marriages, so he has to Google that, and then there’s one where Pete found out that Gabe’s Bronx’s real father, which is laughable because even though Gabe’s hot (and he is, Pete has no problem admitting that), Ashlee acts like his little sister, making him get things off the high shelf for her and Gabe does it because Ashlee has him whipped completely. A few others sum it up by reminding everyone that Gabe’s an asshole and someone hits a little too close to home.

Pete shuts the laptop and twitters from his phone. ‘hope 2 c u all @ show. need 2 bring down the house’

He doesn’t wait around for any replies. He leaves the bus and heads back into the venue, ignoring the guards and the reporters and the fans in the distance who see him and scream. Rumors of his disappearance are greatly exaggerated, even though he keeps feeling like they’re true.

Cobra’s backstage when he walks in and the crowd chanting out front seems to fade into the distance. Victoria and Ryland are talking about bench pressing Nate, and Suarez is scribbling something on the back of a pack of cigarettes. Gabe’s nowhere to be seen, and Pete feels his chest clench, like someone’s got a fist around his heart, choking it until it slows and stops beating altogether. Suarez looks up and nods at Pete, and Pete manages a nod back, wondering if there’s something that will stop him from shaking.

Matt comes out of the room at the back and Pete turns to look. Gabe’s right behind him, sunglasses on and wearing his trademark purple hoodie. Pete swallows hard and just stares, looking for clues in Gabe’s face that will tell him something, anything, about what Gabe’s thinking. The problem with Gabe is that he hides it all, hides it better than Pete, especially when you can’t see his eyes.

The crowd gets louder as the lights go off, and Pete freezes as Gabe turns his head and looks at him. There’s nothing more than that, nothing said and nothing seen. Just Gabe’s shadow sliding over him in the faint light from rooms Pete can’t see.

**

Pete knows all of Gabe’s stories by heart. He knows the jokes and the laughs. It’s not that Gabe has a routine, because it’s never completely the same, but Gabe’s a showman and so he puts on a show. People expect things and he delivers, sometimes better than others. Pete listens to the crowd over the roar of the instruments, and he watches Gabe dance like he’s flying. Gabe gets filled up at concerts, takes all the screams and voices and energy inside him and it’s better than a drug for him. It’s not Gabe that gets them high, or if it is, they do it for him in return.

Tonight he mixes things up and whispers in Victoria’s ear, shaking his head. She gives him a look, and Pete glances at the set list, even though he doesn’t need to. Gabe segues into something that’s not “Pete Wentz is the Only Reason We’re Famous” and Pete watches, everything falling out of place like a jigsaw puzzle slipping off the edge of a table.

The rest of it is a blur and Pete can hear the rest of the band gathering, getting ready and psyched for the show. Patrick comes up behind him and rests his hand on Pete’s shoulder, his forehead pressed to his hand. “They came here to see a show,” he reminds Pete softly.

“They will. Cobra’s got them all fired up.”

“I mean from us.”

Pete nods and sucks at his lip, feeling the swollen flesh. “They will.”

The lights go down on a flash, and everyone comes off stage in a energized, sweaty mess. There’s hugging and high-fives and the bands intermingle while the roadies hit the stage, tearing things down to build them back up again. Gabe is by the edge, his glasses in his hand and his eyes closed, soaking up the last shouts like a junkie taking a hit. In the light and in the open, Pete can see the damage he left. Gabe’s got a black eye of his own and three stitches in his eyebrow. His lower lip is split and there’s a dark black bruise showing through what’s left of the sweat-slick make-up covering up his jaw.

“Surveying your handiwork?” Gabe drawls, shoving off the wall. Pete doesn’t step back, doesn’t give an inch. That’s the secret with Gabe. You can’t give an inch. “I’ll give you credit, Peter.” The words sting, his name stings. Gabe’s voice is thicker, accented like it is when he comes back from visiting family in Uruguay. “The big bad streets of Chicago taught you how to fight.”

“It wasn’t Chicago.” Pete snaps his mouth shut as the lights in the stadium flicker and go out. “Gabe…”

“Showtime.” Gabe snaps his glasses back on and jogs out onto the stage. Pete can see the telltale signs of pain, the way Gabe’s not as fluid, not as languid as he usually is. The crowd goes insane for him, and Gabe eats it up, almost like he’s rising off the ground with the force of it. He builds it up, builds it to a crescendo and then suddenly it’s not Gabe anymore, it’s _them_ , it’s Fall Out Boy and whatever it is that eats Pete alive goes away, swallowed whole by an even bigger beast.

**

There’s a party after, but Pete doesn’t go. He signs a few things and is careful not to answer any questions about Gabe, careful not to let anything show. He gets back to the bus as quickly as he can, stripping down to his briefs and collapsing in his bed, heels of his hands digging into his eyes until all he can see is dark explosions and incandescent light.

“There are bets.”

Pete jerks into a sitting position, blinking hard. He can’t see anything for several minutes, and when he does, nothing looks right. The colors are switched and out of focus, black where the white should be and white instead of black. Gabe’s leaning against the door, his long legs crossed, his arms crossed. Nothing about this is easy, Pete knows. And whatever might have been, there’s no way Gabe will let it be.

“Bets?” His voice is shot and it comes out like a croak. He needs water, but it seems like too much effort. He has to make himself crawl down the bed and snag a bottle from the mini-fridge. He uncaps it and drinks it all in several long swallows. Gabe’s watching him, and Pete can’t look him in the eye. Gabe doesn’t keep anything in his eyes. He hides it all down inside where it can’t be seen. What you get on the surface isn’t Gabe.

“You and me. Bets as to what happened. Bets as to who’s going to dump the tour. Bets.” He shrugs and catches his lower lip between his thumb and his finger. “I was thinking about putting some money down on it, but then Nate said it might be unethical. That’s kind of fucked up, right?”

“Yeah.” Pete swallows and rubs his eyes again, trying to get his vision back to normal. Gabe sways and bends in Pete’s sight until suddenly he’s right again, eyes dark and impenetrable instead of white and shining, black shirt filled with color instead of a ghost of disembodied shapes. “You’re not at the party.”

“Last party I went to was less of a good time than I was hoping for.” Gabe releases his lip and sucks it into his mouth. Pete watches him and then looks down at the floor. Gabe sighs. “So, I have been informed by everyone I know on this tour, as well as everyone on the internet and in my immediate and extended family, that I was an asshole. Seriously, I had someone reply to a post saying they didn’t know who I was, but they knew I’d fucked up.”

“People tell you that no matter what.”

Gabe frowns and then shrugs. “Yeah. Okay, you’re right about that.” Gabe blows out a breath and then rubs the stitches with his fingertips. “Look, here’s the thing. We’re having a problem? Fine. We’re fighting? Great. I just…I don’t appreciate that _you_ threw the first punch and I’m the fucking bad guy here, okay? I mean, no one’s going to believe it, no matter what, because everyone knows you’re the good guy with the heart of gold, and I’m the asshole who makes everything a joke, so it’s not that. I just…you know, if I’m going to play the villain when it comes to my friends, I’d like to have a clue what the fuck it is I’ve done.”

Pete starts to say something and Gabe shakes his head. When he speaks again, his voice is rougher, harder.

“I’m a dick. I own that. I want things the way I want them and I play as hard as I work, but I _work_ as hard as I play too. I’m not you, and I’ve never fucking done something to hurt someone intentionally. They’re _in_ on the joke, Pete, remember? Or was that joke just on me?”

“Gabe.” The ground’s falling out from beneath him, his stomach plummeting . “No.”

“I gotta go.” Gabe pushes off the doorframe and the stitches are red from where he’s rubbed them and, without the makeup, the dark bruise on his jaw looks angry. “See ya.”

**

Pete watches the world go by electronically that night, reading random people’s journals and twitters and posts. He reads fanfic and bad poetry and downloads shit illegally, dumping most of it unheard. The concert wrap-ups start rolling in and they’re good, better than good, and it almost makes him laugh. One girl comments on the energy and another comments on how good Pete looked and someone else says something about how Pete and Gabe should fight all the time if it makes every song sound so raw and personal. He deletes those from his cache and goes back to the ones that simply talk about how cute they all are, how much they _raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawk_. It’s easier to swallow.

He gets a text at four, just a few minutes after he hears everyone coming back to the buses. He’s given up the Internet for a sketch book and his ipod, but his phone vibrates and he picks it up. It’s Suarez and Pete isn’t sure he can open it. Moments like this, it’s hard not to flash back to waking up in the hospital, tube down his throat and his parents worried faces. It’s hard to think about choices he made and choices made for him. It all comes back to that, everything, like it’s the core of him, like he didn’t exist before then and maybe he didn’t. Maybe who he is now started then and the smart ass, pissed off kid isn’t real at all.

“gabe drunk. v. drunk. u ok?”

His fingers tremble and he has to concentrate on the keypad. He wants to tell Alex they’ll stop the buses and Pete will come over, hold Gabe’s head and tell him he’s sorry, but the words don’t come to his fingers any better than they come through his mouth. “fine,” he texts, “just fine.”

They stop for breakfast around nine, and the thought of food makes Pete’s stomach churn. He hasn’t slept, maybe in days, but he’s not sure because everything feels like a dream. A nightmare. Patrick comes in and looks at him, tilting his head toward the front of the bus. Pete nods and forces himself off the bed, dragging on a pair of faded black jeans and an orange hoodie.

The sun is bright and painful and he has to squint against it, even with his sunglasses on. Everyone’s moving around, stretching and talking, bands milling together. The air smells like scorched potatoes and burnt toast, grease hanging like clouds. They’re always out of place at truck stops, their clothes wrong and their hair wrong and their attitude wrong, and normally Gabe plays it up, sidling up to Pete or Ryland or Patrick, wrapping his arm around them and acting the part. Today Gabe’s nowhere in sight and the truck drivers and bikers barely give them a second glance.

Pete doesn’t pay attention to the menu, just orders something. He doesn’t really care. Everything tastes like ashes as it is, even the coffee, which normally burns like sulfur, feels like cotton gray. Victoria comes over after everyone orders and sits next to him, crowding all of them into the booth. Pete moves over as much as he can, but it’s not made for three people, much less the four of them now sitting on the bench.

“Gabe threw up for three hours straight.” She smiles like she’s telling them it’s sunny skies and smooth sailing ahead. “We’re now out of booze.” She turns her gaze to Pete and she’s still smiling, but her eyes aren’t anything but worried, maybe angry. “We needed booze last night and he’d already drank it all, so maybe we could stop somewhere and get some booze or you guys could just kiss and make up _and_ we could stop somewhere for booze.”

“He hates me,” Pete whispers.

“No. You don’t get shitfaced over people you hate. You get shitfaced over people you love, you idiot.” She sighs and shakes her head. “You’re both miserable. It doesn’t matter what happened or who started it or anything. All that matters is that you guys _fix_ it. Before we all get together and kill you like a pair of rabid dogs.”

He nods at her too-wide smile and waits for her to slide out of the seat so that he can get up. “I’ll just…go. To the bus then.”

“We’ll bring you both something to eat.” Her smile’s really more of a grimace, and Pete turns on his heel, hurrying out into the sunlight again. The door to the bus is closed and locked, but they all have the codes to get in, so he gets through that with still-shaking fingers and lets the door shut behind him. All the lights are off and everything is quiet. Pete’s familiar with vans and bunked buses and the kind that he’s fortunate enough to have these days, so he makes his way back down the hallway to the last bunk on the left.

Gabe’s naked except for his briefs and he looks pale underneath his naturally darker skin tone. His hair looks wild – curly and sweaty and combed through by consoling fingers – and his mouth is open, his breath rancid with sweet alcohol and sweeter vomit.

Pete goes to the bathroom and gets a washcloth and a glass of water, wishing he had something like the coffee from the truck stop diner to burn the taste of it away for Gabe. He wipes Gabe’s face with the corner of the cloth and Gabe’s eyes scrunch closed tighter and he bats Pete’s hand away.

“Le’ me th’ fuck ‘lone.” Gabe slurs roughly, trying to hide his face in the pillow. “Go th’ fuck ‘way.”

“Hey.” Pete’s careful around the sores and cuts and bruising, careful with every touch. Gabe’s skin is always soft, especially around his eyes where he gets circles when he doesn’t sleep, where bruises show so dark. “Wake up, sleeping beauty.”

Gabe blinks slowly and then turns his head away from Pete. “Wrong bus.”

“No. I was looking for you.” Pete helps Gabe into a sitting position despite his protests and helps pour the glass of water down his throat. Gabe nearly gags on it, but manages to swallow it down, and when he’s done, he shifts away from Pete, resting his back against the wall of the bus, his knees drawn up to his chest. He’s skinny – always too skinny on tour – and he looks younger, all arms and legs and eyes. “You okay?”

“Fucking fantastic.” Gabe’s voice is still slurred, rough and haggard. He sounds like he looks and Pete feels even worse. “How the fuck are you?”

“When I was a kid, my folks sent me away. You know that.”

Gabe starts to say something and stops, and Pete’s grateful, not sure he could handle anything smartass or even sympathetic right now.

“It was awful. I don’t talk about it. Lots of shit went down that nobody needs to know about, that nobody needs to think about. Suffice it to say that I’m a pretty fucked up guy and I’d wager a large chunk of why goes back to then. Before, maybe. After, for sure.”

Gabe nods once, still all wrapped up in himself. Pete copies his posture, staring at the wall across from them.

“That night…We’d been dicking around before the party, remember? Flipping each other shit? I’d jumped on your back and we’d wrestled a little? Just letting off steam?”

Gabe stretches out his legs and they hang off the edge of the bunk like limp marionettes with no one controlling them. “Yeah.”

“And we were all drinking. Having fun. Dancing. And then someone said something. I thought it was you. I was _sure_ it was you and…it wasn’t even that bad, but the fact that it _was you_ made me just…go a little crazy.” Pete frowns and digs at the hole in the knee of his jeans. “It wasn’t you though. I realized that last night after you left. After I got the text that you were drunk. I forget sometimes that I’m not like other people, that everything is out there for public consumption, that people that aren’t my friends know shit about me, know the secrets most people get to hide.”

“You really thought it was me.” Gabe blows out a breath, and his voice is heavy, and Pete knows that he’s hurt Gabe more than he’s probably ever hurt anyone before and Gabe was right, it was as deliberate, on purpose. He didn’t think, he just assumed, just bought into the persona Gabe put out on display even though, just like with everything else, Pete should have known better.

“I thought…” Pete glances at Gabe out of the corner of his eye. “I thought that only people that loved me could hurt me that much.”

“Yeah, that’s how it should be.” Gabe rubs his hands on his thighs and looks up at the base of the bunk above them. “But lots of people love you, Pete. People you know, people you don’t. You’re famous and so everybody gets to think they know you, that they have the right to say that kind of shit.”

“I know.”

“The thing is…the thing is…” Gabe turns his head and looks at Pete. “The people who love you _won’t_ say that shit about you. They might say it to you, they might call you on something, but they’re never going to do it to _hurt_ you, they’re never going to twist a knife they know is going to make you bleed. That’s not what we do, Pete. Not what I do.”

“I know.” Pete’s voice sounds small, smaller than even he should have. “I do know.”

“Yeah. I know you do.” Gabe wraps an arm around Pete’s shoulders and pulls him in close. Pete gasps and closes his eyes, burying his face in the sweaty, musky smell of Gabe’s chest. “And I know rationality isn’t anyone’s strong suit when it comes to shit like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete whispers, choking down the sob hanging in the back of his throat.

“You took me by surprise, and then when I figured it out, it _hurt_ , man. And I wasn’t any more rational, and I’m sorry about that.” Gabe’s fingers find Pete’s hair and comb through it, easing out the tangles and dried product. They’re both a mess, figuratively and literally. “Never hurt you, not for real, not with the real shit. I might be a dick and I might bullshit and I might talk, but I’d never, _never_ do that.”

“I know.” Pete’s voice is shaking, _Pete’s_ shaking and he lets Gabe wrap him up in his arms, hold him closer still. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Shh.” Gabe kisses the top of Pete’s head and Pete breathes, his chest relaxing for the first time since he threw that punch. “It’s okay.”

“No. It’s not. But it will be. I’ll make it okay. I promise.” Pete pulls back to look at Gabe, and he can see himself reflected in the darkness of Gabe’s eyes. He looks like hell, looks like he’s been _through_ hell. He blinks and he sees all of Gabe again, and realizes that Gabe’s probably seeing the same reflection, that maybe the outside isn’t always so different from what’s underneath.

“It’s fine,” Gabe assures him. “Just tell one person it was all your fault and the rest of the tuned in world will do the rest for you.”

Pete laughs. “That’s part of the problem.”

“Fitting that we make it the solution.” Gabe tugs Pete close again and holds him, his breath steady and warm as his heart pounds just beneath Pete’s ear. “Also,” he whispers, his voice thick again, with emotion or laughter, Pete can’t tell and realizes it doesn’t matter, “you can buy us more booze.”  



End file.
